Christopher Benfey

Christopher Benfey (born October 28, 1954) is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.

Early life and education Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana. and attended The Putney School. The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He was an art critic for Slate.

He is Professor Emeritus of English, formerly the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, where he has taught since 1989. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Books Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable (1999) The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, (2003) A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (2008) American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South (2010) Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay (2012) IF: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years (2019)